Debian Bookworm+ on Cavium ThunderX?

[Steffen Grunewald]

Good morning,

I beg your pardon if this problem has been discussed before, but I couldn't
find anything useful in the list archives.

We've been operating a Gigabyte R120-T35-00 (Mainboard model MT30-GS2-00)
equipped with a Cavium ThunderX (CN8880) 32-core processor, for several
years now.
It was delivered with Debian preinstalled in 2018, so that must have been
Stretch, also confirmed by my handwritten notes which list kernel 4.9.0.

Upgrading to Debian Buster was successful, the current kernel is 4.19.0-25
aka 4.19.289-2. (It doesn't even properly identify the CPU, only gives a
BogoMIPS value of 200.00.)

Any attempt to boot a Bullseye (5.x) or Bookworm kernel (6.x) resulted in
an early kernel panic.

Is it possible to upgrade this machine to a more recent distribution, and
if so, what are the tricks (kernel parameters etc.)?

Any hint, pointer, suggestion is welcome.

Thanks,
Steffen

[Steffen Grunewald]

Post by Steffen Grunewald
Any attempt to boot a Bullseye (5.x) or Bookworm kernel (6.x) resulted in
an early kernel panic.

Try the latest sid kernel (6.7.9) and the latest upstream too.

Doing so the Debian way would require a major upgrade of the related tools
(most notably, gcc), also to build some initrd - something I'd like to avoid
on the only system with that kind of hardware I have.

I'll go for some live distros first since I cannot fully exclude "just a
missing kernel parameter", and Ubuntu 23.10 seems to be the newest I can
get hold of. Previous attempts used PXE boot, so kernel parameters might
be something to look for first.

This

sounds like something that will need a git bisect to figure out though.
https://wiki.debian.org/DebianKernel/GitBisect

That's the really time-consuming part...
I'm kind of surprised that nobody else seems to use this hardware platform?

Thanks so far,
Steffen

[Wookey]

Post by Steffen Grunewald

Post by Steffen Grunewald
Any attempt to boot a Bullseye (5.x) or Bookworm kernel (6.x) resulted in
an early kernel panic.

That's the really time-consuming part...
I'm kind of surprised that nobody else seems to use this hardware platform?

I think I had one in the past. I may still have one in the pile. If I
can find it I'll try to take a look at this, but I'm short of tuits,
especuially until the time64 transition is over the hump.

Is yours actual ThunderX or ThunderX2? I recall the former being more or less unobtanium.

Wookey